“In the long run, the most vicious predators, like most dread disease-causing microbes, bring about their own ruin by killing their victims. Restrained predation—the attack that doesn't kill or does kill only slowly—is a recurring theme in evolution. The predatory precursors of mitochondria invaded and exploited their hosts, but the prey resisted. Forced to be content with an expendable part of the prey (its waste)… some mitochondria precursors grew but never killed their providers. …The original prey was probably a larger bacterium like Thermoplasma.”
Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors (1986)
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Lynn Margulis 24
American evolutionary biologist 1938–2011Related quotes
Source: A Natural History of the Senses (1991), p. 229
“Animals that kill usually have far more social relationships than those they prey upon.”
"Letter on Animal Liberation" (1999)
The Evolutionary Future of Man (1993)
" The Meat Eaters http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/the-meat-eaters/", The New York Times, 19 Sept. 2010
“The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”
Source: Woman and the New Race, (1922), Chapter 5, "The Wickedness of Creating Large Families."
Context: Thus we see that the second and third children have a very good chance to live through the first year. Children arriving later have less and less chance, until the twelfth has hardly any chance at all to live twelve months. This does not complete the case, however, for those who care to go farther into the subject will find that many of those who live for a year die before they reach the age of five. Many, perhaps, will think it idle to go farther in demonstrating the immorality of large families, but since there is still an abundance of proof at hand, it may be offered for the sake of those who find difficulty in adjusting old-fashioned ideas to the facts. The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it. The same factors which create the terrible infant mortality rate, and which swell the death rate of children between the ages of one and five, operate even more extensively to lower the health rate of the surviving members.
Did these people not know that if they continued to feed and spread and grow, with the tendrils of their greed wrapping themselves around their host, the day would come when it could no longer sustain them and when it died they would too?
Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder, Cap 19
Source: Eternal Treblinka (2002), p. 133
" The Moral Problem of Predation http://jeffersonmcmahan.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/The-Moral-Problem-of-Predation.pdf" (2014), p. 10